O O Ø O O O O
No-Ride
The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Dear Sir;
Thank-you for making our country a safer place.
I speak, of course, of your government’s recent unveiling of its no-fly list—the long-awaited passenger protect program. (Very good work on the name, by the way. If it weren’t for the media, I would have had no idea what the program was about. I suspect that was intentional—all the better for catching the evil terrorists off-guard, eh? It’s just too bad the media spilled the beans. Maybe next time you can find a way to keep them quiet. When will they learn to just simply print the news they are given?)
Mr. Harper, I wanted to congratulate you (and your government) on this important milestone in national security. The no-fly list is an essential measure to ensure evildoers don’t get onto our planes. Sure, we already have laws to protect us from those who have actually committed crimes, but we all know that when it comes to air travel, the problem is those individuals who are about to do evil. That’s where the brilliance of the no-fly list comes in: it stops those who are too dangerous to be allowed to fly, yet too innocent to actually arrest.
Since we’re finally going down this road, I was wondering, in a similar vein, if you could do something about public transit? Maybe a no-ride list? After all, how many times have you been riding the C-train and had your pleasant commute disturbed by some miscreant who didn’t buy a ticket? I can’t count the number of times where someone has been hauled off the train for riding without a ticket, or putting their feet on the seats, or huddling behind a newspaper huffing glue. The really frustrating part of transit bylaw enforcement is that you just know who the offenders are going to be—you can practically tell by just looking at them.
And that’s where the model of the no-fly list comes in handy: we can proactively ban these would-be transit offenders by putting their names on a secret list. Furthermore, since the justification for putting names on the list is classified, no-one ever need know it’s because they just look shifty!
Indeed, Mr. Harper, the no-fly list is a masterful piece of policy. I only hope that, like my proposed no-ride list, we can successfully expand this program into other areas of our society. After all, it’s only through classified watchlists and secret government committees that we can truly keep those undesirable innocents from possibly, one day, potentially committing crimes (or in this case, violating city ordinances.)
Thank-you Sir for your excellent work in running our country. I look forward to corresponding with you again in the near future.
Kjell Wooding
June 26, 2007
OOØOOOODCCCXXVII
June 27th, 2007 at 11:51 am
You’re already on double secret probation…